


Sonida Senior Living Grows For The Future
The last to report 2024 earnings in our sector, Sonida Senior Living turned in a decent fourth quarter, but maybe not as good as they were hoping for. They are looking to the future, however, and not past performance, and are gearing up for growth. While the same-community occupancy of 86.6% in the fourth quarter is certainly above average for the industry, the year-over-year increase of just 70 basis points was below average. Many providers are still putting out census growth numbers that will not be sustainable as communities begin to stabilize, so increasing by 70 basis points in the future will look pretty good. But we are not there yet, especially with new development still way... Read More »
60 Seconds with Swett: The Demand for SNFs
We had a fantastic webinar last week that covered our recently published valuation statistics from The Senior Care Acquisition Report but also how valuations, the lending environment and M&A strategies are changing in 2025, so far. Jason Punzel of Senior Living Investment Brokerage, Steve Munn of VIUM Capital and JP LoMonaco of CBRE joined me for the discussion and all had fascinating and useful takeaways on the current state of the market. I ended the webinar with a question about what type of property each panelist would purchase themselves, if they had the equity to finance the rest of the acquisition with debt. Although much of the webinar centered around the seniors housing... Read More »
60-ish Seconds with Steve Monroe: So, What’s Goin’ On?
While I did not make it to the NIC Spring Conference last week, my colleagues Ben and Steph were there to meet and greet the record crowd. The crowd included a lot of smiling faces. Some takeaways included the expectation that liquidity is returning and that we will see bigger deals this year. Also, lenders will be putting out more cash in 2025 than in 2024. All of this bodes well for the M&A market. There was, however, some concern about what the Trump Administration is doing, and what the impact will be on seniors housing and care. And there should be concern. Even though the labor situation has improved, my guess is that there will be fewer low-wage workers around given some... Read More »
Brookdale Bucking Historical Trend
Brookdale Senior Living announced its February occupancy results, and it was better than we expected. Month-end occupancy has now increased for three straight months since November. At the end of February, occupancy was 80.8%, marking the seventh straight month that it has topped 80%, and up 20 basis points from the end of January. As you know, the winter months are usually terrible for census, and this year the strong flu has not helped. But Brookdale has succeeded, nonetheless. Weighted average occupancy in February increased by 10 basis points to 79.3%, and that seems to be stuck in a holding pattern as it has hardly budged for six months. The share price jumped by 3.6% on the news on a... Read More »